Nothing special about SBS staff retention levels

SBS has been forced to launch a strategic overhaul to stem the ­exodus of ‘high performing’ workers.

SBS financial director James Taylor. Picture: Ryan Osland.

SBS has been forced to launch a strategic overhaul to stem the ­exodus of “high performing” workers quitting the public broadcaster and to combat sky-high rates of young staff leaving before serving out their first year.

Internal board documents and reports presented to the most senior ranks of SBS — obtained by The Australian under freedom of information laws — reveal long-running concerns over the ability of the taxpayer-funded specialist broadcaster to retain talent, ­especially among Generation Y.

A paper presented to the board in June outlined in part a three-year strategy to keep a lid on voluntary turnover at 15 per cent this year and to reduce it to 13 per cent by the end of 2022.

The report, prepared by SBS director of people and culture Stig Bell, also aims to keep the loss of “high-potential/performance talent” to 10 per cent this year, with an aim to reduce this to below 8 per cent by the end of 2022.

In the year to May, SBS lost 14.4 per cent of its staff. At the same time, employees who left SBS after less than a year ­accounted for more than 28 per cent of all staff leaving.

SBS received $280 million in funding from the federal budget last year.

In his report, Mr Bell, who ­describes himself on his LinkedIn page as “currently leading the charge for transformational change at Australia’s coolest little public broadcaster”, noted that companies with “higher employee trust” were more profitable and experienced up to 50 per cent less turnover.

“In a high-trust culture employees feel empowered to give extra and drive higher levels of ­engagement,” Mr Bell said. “Employees who work in high-trust environments are much more likely to tell others about their positive work experiences outside the organisation.”

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A spokeswoman for SBS said the broadcaster operated “in a highly competitive and rapidly changing sector so we are pleased that our overall staff turnover is often better than industry” and noted that employee engagement was higher than the nat­ional ­average.

“It’s not surprising that in an industry with such fierce competition for certain roles that there is some movement in the sector, however SBS is engaging with more Australians than ever before and delivering more for audiences that at any time, and our engaged and high-performing team are central to this success,” SBS said. “Like any ­responsible organisation committed to continuous improvement, we track and ­report on staffing along with many other aspects of our operations.”

The FOI documents obtained by The Australian include a report compiled for the first half of 2016 showing that SBS was “losing 17 per cent of employees who were rated ‘exceeds’ ”, which was far higher than industry benchmarks that suggested turnover of high performers should be between 5 and 10 per cent.

Across the entire business, SBS was losing 13 per cent of its staff. Excluding those on casual contracts, a whopping 20 per cent of employees were leaving the business at the time.

“Turnover by tenure is interesting — it shows we are losing 42 per cent of people in the first year,” the biannual dashboard ­report for January through June 2016 said. “If we take the contract expiry out we are still losing people at a rate of around 35 per cent within their first year of SBS.”

Young staff were also leaving the organisation in droves. By the end of 2016, 39 per cent of Gen Y workers were quitting SBS after less than a year. That compares to an average ­national tenure for Gen Y ­employees at their workplace of just under three years.

By the end of last year, staff turnover had “remained relatively stable” at 14.3 per cent, ­excluding casual workers. This was lower than the Media Federation of Australia benchmark of about 30 per cent.

But Mr Bell noted the turnover figures were still higher than Australian Bureau of Statistics data on the IT, media and telecommunications industry, which had turnover at less than 12 per cent — “showing that SBS may have a higher turnover than the industry average” — in a report endorsed by SBS chief financial officer James Taylor.

Separate board documents, which, mid-last year, called out the high rate of first-year quitters, warned that SBS did “not have an ­on-boarding program” that “could be considered along with reviewing exit data to guide actions ­required to reduce” the rate of new employees leaving the business. SBS has since introduced an on-boarding program.

John Sintras was appointed chief audience and content officer in April last year and left the business just six months later.

In the most recent SBS annual report, chairman ­Bulent Hass Dellal and managing director ­Michael Ebeid say the broadcaster is “focused on ­attracting and retaining the best media ­talent”, and that its own employee opinion survey found that 77 per cent of staff were engaged and 92 per cent were proud to work for the organisation.